Things They Don't Tell You When You Follow God Closely — Faith Does Not Make You Immune to Pain

This is post 6 in Things They Don't Tell You When You Follow God Closely, a weekly Sunday series from Alpha VI Battalion.

They Did Not Tell You Faith Is Not a Force Field

Somewhere in the cultural version of Christianity there is an idea that following God closely means God will protect you from the worst things. That faith is a kind of immunity. That if you pray enough, believe enough, live right enough, the catastrophic losses and the unbearable grief will pass over you.

That is not what the Bible teaches. And it is not what the lives of the people who followed God most closely demonstrate.

Job was described by God Himself as blameless and upright. He lost everything. David was called a man after God's own heart. He buried a child. Paul walked closer with God than most people ever will. He was beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and eventually executed.

Faith does not make you immune to pain. That is not the deal.

The Pain Is Real and It Is Allowed to Be Real

One of the most damaging things the church sometimes does is rush people through grief because prolonged grief looks like insufficient faith. It does not. Jesus wept at Lazarus's tomb knowing He was about to raise him. He did not perform the miracle from a distance and skip the grief. He entered it.

Your pain is real. Your loss is real. Your grief is allowed to be as heavy as it actually is. Faith does not require you to pretend otherwise. It requires you to trust that the God who is present in your grief is also sovereign over what caused it.

Those two things can be true at the same time. The pain and the trust. The grief and the faith.

The Difference Faith Makes Is Not Absence of Pain. It Is Presence of Company.

You are not promised that the valley will be bypassed. You are promised that when you walk through it you will not walk alone. That is a different promise. It requires a different kind of faith to receive it.

The faith that says God will keep the valley from happening is fragile. It breaks the first time the valley appears because the promise was never real.

The faith that says God is in the valley with me is durable. It holds because the presence is real even when the pain is also real.

You were not promised immunity. You were promised company. Hold onto the company. The valley has an end even when you cannot see it from inside it.

Stay in it, Light Bringer.

Continue Reading in This Series

Previous: Your Old Life Will Try to Come Back

Next: Obedience Will Look Foolish to Smart People

Wear What You Believe

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